If you see something, say nothing

Andrew C. McCarthy

Changes to the AP stylebook show that we’re blinding ourselves to the connections between Islamic extremism and terrorism.

It was a report of the now numbingly familiar sort. Witnesses at the synagogue in Paris recounted that an Iranian immigrant had been screaming “Allahu Akbar!” while he chased the rabbi and his son. When he finally caught up, he slashed away at them with a box-cutter, causing severe lacerations. Nevertheless, the Associated Press assured readers that “[a]n official investigation was underway to determine a possible motive.”

 

Quite a mystery, that.

It is necessary to search for some “possible” motive because to notice the actual and perfectly obvious motive is verboten in the judgment of both the legacy media and Western governments. The motive, of course, is adherence to Islamic supremacist ideology, a mainstream interpretation of Muslim doctrine commonly referred to by the shorthand “Islamist.”

Indeed, just this April, the AP revised its stylebook to posit new guidelines for use of the term “Islamist.” In so doing, the news service deferred to admonitions from the Council on American-Islamic Relations. CAIR, the Muslim Brotherhood’s influential public-relations-cum-lawfare arm in the United States, is a longtime supporter 0f Hamas, the terrorist organization that doubles as the Brotherhood’s Palestinian branch.

Before these revisions, the definition off which the AP had been working was reasonably accurate. An Islamist, according to the old guidelines, was “a supporter of government in accord with the laws of Islam.” Such supporters make up a sizeable percentage of the 1.4 billion-strong global Islamic ummah (the community), and thus reflect a wide range of Muslim notions about how best to impose these “laws of Islam”—the societal framework and politico-legal system known as sharia (the path). But all Islamists agree that they must be imposed. That is what makes an Islamist an Islamist. The dramatic ascendancy of Islamists—the implementation of their substantially anti-democratic system through democratic procedures—is the story of the so-called Arab Spring.

There is plenty of disagreement within the ummah about what constitutes sharia, which is derived from the Koran and other sources of Islamic scripture, in particular the hadith—authoritative collections of the words and deeds of Mohammed, Islam’s warrior prophet. Some claim it is merely a set of aspirational guidelines intended as a private behavioral compass designed to achieve a Muslim’s personal experience of the divine. This construction, though held by various reformers and modernizing “secular Muslims,” flies in the face of some stubborn realities.

Sharia, for example, is the law of Sunni Saudi Arabia and Shiite Iran, bastions of fundamentalist Islam that admit of no other legal systems, that employ “religious police” to promote strict sharia compliance, and that routinely apply Islam’s harsh corporal punishments, such as scourging and even stoning. Furthermore, even in Islamic countries that attempt to meld sharia with other legal systems (e.g., Napoleonic law), sharia is given pride of place and enforced both officially, in civil and criminal court cases, and culturally, by public mores.

The claims that sharia is aspirational and a matter of personal conscience are further contradicted, by its emphasis on governance: Only a small percentage of Islamic ideology prescribes what we in the West would recognize as religious principles (e.g., the oneness of Allah); the lion’s share is a thoroughgoing regulation of political and social life, from economic and military affairs through interpersonal relations and matters of hygiene. In addition, sharia has long been codified: The treatise “Umdat al-Salik,” reflecting the broad consensus on sharia’s prescriptions across the four ancient Sunni jurisprudential schools, was assembled by the renowned scholar Ahmad ibn an-Naqib al-Misri in the fourteenth century. It is translated into English as Reliance of the Traveller: A Classic Manual of Islamic Sacred Law, and is readily available through most large book retailers—complete with endorsements, in the manual’s foreword, from such influential institutions as Cairo’s al-Azhar University, the seat of Sunni learning since the tenth century, and the International Institute of Islamic Thought, an Islamist think-tank headquartered in Virginia by the Muslim Brotherhood.

The Islamic supremacist interpretation of sharia found in Reliance of the Traveller and systematically taught by the Muslim Brotherhood, the world’s most significant Islamic mass-movement, is the dynamic Islam of the Muslim Middle East. It is also gradually making inroads in the West, courtesy of a Brotherhood stratagem best described as “voluntary apartheid.” The idea is for Muslims to immigrate and integrate, but not assimilate. They are encouraged, instead, to move into Islamic enclaves, organizing their lives around the local mosque and Islamic community center, which the Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna stressed as the “axis” of the movement. The goal is to pressure the host government to abide an ever-increasing degree of sharia autonomy.

This form of sharia, to which Islamists widely adhere and aspire, is fundamentally antithetical to Western liberalism. It rejects individual liberty and privacy, equality before the law for women and non-Muslims, freedom of conscience and speech, economic liberty, and even the bedrock principle that a body politic has the power to make law for itself, irrespective of any religious or ideological code. Sharia also expressly endorses jihad. These are the “laws of Islam” to which the AP refers without describing them. The installation of these laws is the top priority of emerging Islamist “democracies,” which establish Islam as the state religion and enshrine sharia in their new constitutions—such new governments as those in Iraq and Afghanistan, whose sharia constitutions were drafted with the helping hand of the U.S. State Department.

The former AP definition of Islamist elaborated that “[t]hose who view the Quran as a political model encompass a wide range of Muslims, from mainstream politicians to militants known as jihadi.” April’s revisions bowdlerized this definition, though. The AP denied the ideological component—the imperative to establish governance under the laws of Islam—from Islamic supremacists who engage in violence. Henceforth, an Islamist is to be understood as merely “an advocate or supporter of a political movement that favors reordering government and society in accordance with laws prescribed by Islam.” The term is not to be used “as a synonym for Islamic fighters, militants, extremists, or radicals.”

In a vertiginous bit of incoherence, the AP conceded that such aggressors “may or may not be Islamists”—although it was not explained how they “may not be” if, as is the case, what moves them to aggression is this aforementioned “desire to reorder government and society in accordance with laws prescribed by Islam.” Moreover, it is difficult to see how a Muslim who wants to supplant the U.S. Constitution and Western law with repressive sharia is not “extremist” and “radical,” even if, to our great relief, he seeks to achieve this end through “a political movement” rather than savagery.

To support their cleaving of supremacist ideology from the violence it reliably inspires, the best the AP could offer was the tautology that because some Islamists are non-violent, Islamists are not necessarily violent: “Those who view the Quran as a political model encompass a wide range of Muslims, from mainstream politicians to militants known as jihadi.” That, however, simply demonstrates that the press has defined “mainstream” down, not that “Islamist” ought to be spruced into respectability. Nevertheless, AP journalists were instructed to “be specific and use the name of militant affiliations: al-Qaida-linked, Hezbollah, Taliban, etc.,” rather than branding terrorists as “Islamists.” The reasoning may be gibberish but the message was clear: Islam is never to be portrayed as relevant to, much less causative of, violence. If you see something, say nothing.

With inevitable irony, less than two weeks after the AP codified the expungement of Islamist ideology from Islamic terrorism, a pair of Islamists bombed the Boston Marathon. Dozens were wounded, many losing limbs. Three spectators were killed: two young women, Krystle Campbell and Lu Lingzi, and eight-year-old Martin Richard.

The two improvised explosive devices used in the attack mirrored a type commonly used by jihadists throughout the last decade to wage a terrorist war against American and allied forces—small homemade pressure-cooker bombs, easy to carry, camouflage, and detonate remotely. The al Qaeda network does not merely deploy these IEDs; they teach fledgling terrorists how to make them and even publish the recipe in a widely disseminated jihadist periodical called Inspire.

Yet, in the days after the Marathon bombing, before the culprits were identified, neither our extensive recent history of jihadist mass-murder plots against dense civilian targets, nor the jihad’s nimble post-9/11 shift from heavy bombs and airliner missiles to IEDs counted for much. Conventional media wisdom held it inconceivable that the bombers could have been Muslims. Thus was the most likely explanation dismissed out of hand. To the contrary, speculation ran rampant that the terrorists were “right-wing extremists,” bizarrely said to be inspired by the fact that the Marathon is run on “Patriot’s Day.” Writing at the left-wing Salon.com, David Sirota instantiated the Zeitgeist with an appalling column entitled “Let’s hope the Boston Marathon bomber is a white American.”

Well, as Kevin D. Williamson quipped at National Review, our cognoscenti did get a pair of “literal Caucasians”—just not the kind they were bargaining for. The terrorists were young Muslim brothers, the Tsarnaevs, whose family had immigrated to the United States from Chechnya, a hotbed of jihadist violence in the Northern Caucasus. The tale that surrounds them—the combustible and all-too-familiar mix of steely Islamist determination with Leviathan’s Clouseau-meets-Magoo approach to counterterrorism—would be comic if its wages were not so painful. In a memoir of the government’s first grappling with Islamic terrorism in our homeland in the early 1990s (when I was a federal prosecutor), I labeled this syndrome “Willful Blindness.” If anything, things have significantly deteriorated in the ensuing twenty years, to something more like “Depraved Indifference.”

It turns out that our nation’s $100 billion per annum national security edifice—the gargantuan intelligence community along with the FBI and a newer bureaucratic behemoth, the Department of Homeland Security—was acutely aware of the Marathon jihad’s apparent ringleader. The older Tsarnaev brother, twenty-six-year-old Tamerlan, namesake of a fourteenth-century Muslim warrior whose campaigns through Asia Minor are legendary for their brutalization of non-Muslims, had been brought to the attention of American authorities by the Russian intelligence service. The Russians surmised that he’d been “radicalized”—another conventional term that sedulously elides mention of what one has been radicalized by—and might be spoiling to join the jihad in Chechnya or nearby Dagestan. Consequently, the CIA entered him into a terrorism database.

Separately, the FBI conducted an investigation in which agents actually interviewed Tamerlan face-to-face, confirming that he was an Islamist. We have since learned that his wife, an American Christian named Katherine Russell who lived with him in the small apartment where the Marathon bombs were built, had converted to Islam, donning the veil and isolating herself from American acquaintances in favor of other Muslim women. Tamerlan took to studying with Sheikh Feiz Mohammed, a former boxer like himself, but also a notorious sharia hardliner who spews bile against non-Muslims and endorses jihadist violence. Tamerlan even began maintaining YouTube playlists glorifying Islamic supremacist conquest, which included a ditty called “I Will Dedicate My Life to Jihad.” One of the lists he entitled, simply, “Terrorists.”

Yet the FBI closed its file on Tsarnaev, concluding that the investigation had turned up “no derogatory information.” How could that be? Easy: The government may have concluded that Tsarnaev was steeped in jihadist ideology, but, like the AP, it has internalized the politically correct guide to what it fastidiously calls “violent extremism”—i.e., Islamic terror without the Islam. In accordance with these protocols, Islamic supremacist ideology is utterly unrelated to terrorism carried out by Muslims.

For those of us not in this hallucinatory thrall, it comes as no surprise that Tamerlan Tsarnaev did, in fact, travel to the Northern Caucasus, just as Russian intelligence suspected he would. He remained in that region for six months, reportedly meeting up with veteran jihadists. Given the advanced degree of sophistication suggested by the IEDs the Tsarnaevs eventually deployed, it is a virtual certainty that Tamerlan received guerrilla training during his journey—enough, no doubt, to instruct his younger brother Dzhokhar, when the elder brother finally returned to the United States last year. That re-entry, it bears observing, raised no terror watchlist alarms or other red flags. After all, the file had been closed. Yes, Tsarnaev may have been a five-alarm Islamist—hiding not in plain sight but, rather, not at all. Yet, so far as the government was concerned, he had not acted on his ideology . . . yet.

Fight and slay the pagans wherever ye find them,” commands Allah in the Koran’s sura 9:5. “And seize them, beleaguer them, and lie in wait for them in every stratagem of war.” The war ends in one of only two ways: conversion or submission. Sura 9’s “verses of the sword” elaborate that conversion requires the defeated to “repent, and establish regular prayers, and pay Zakat”—the Muslim obligation of “charitable” giving, which, as Reliance of the Traveller explains, calls for one-eighth of contributions to be diverted to support violent jihad. Submission, sura 9:29 instructs, allows non-Muslims to live only as dhimmis: an inferior caste that surrenders to the authority of sharia and pays the Jizya—a poll-tax that is accepted as tribute provided that some humiliation attends the payment so the non-Muslims “feel themselves subdued.”

These are only the best-known aggressor verses. There are over 100 verses in the Koran that explicitly or implicitly endorse holy war. And that is what jihad, in the classic sense, is. Because jihad is a central tenet of Islam, authentic Muslim moderates must try to reinterpret it, to render it as a personal, internal struggle to become a better person—although even this overhaul means “better” not based on some universal standard of the good, but in the peculiarly Islamic sense of becoming more sharia-compliant. Still, the revisionist effort cannot bleach out the Koran’s jihad, which is incontestably forcible in nature. As Reliance of the Traveller succinctly teaches: “Jihad means to war against non-Muslims, and is etymologically derived from the word mujahada, signifying warfare to establish the religion.”

Warfare to establish the religion. Recall that establishing the religion—installing the laws of Islam—is what being an Islamist is all about. Warfare is just a method; it doesn’t change the underlying ideology. Indeed, if anything, it makes the ideology more pronounced.

This is why the Western depiction of jihadists is so risible. You are not to see them as “Islamists”; they are “violent extremists” . . . just make sure to avert your eyes from what it is that they are being extreme about. Violence, however, is a tactic, not an ideology; and appending “ism” to “extreme” cannot obscure that the word is an adjective in search of something to modify. That something is Islam. That is what the violence is about. Jihadists do not kill wantonly. They kill for a very specific purpose: to install the sharia legal system and societal framework. That this is a notoriously ruthless form of extortion does not mean it lacks extortion’s cold logic. The installation of sharia is what the Koran and hadith mean by “establish the religion.”

“It is the nature of Islam to dominate, not to be dominated.” So taught Banna, the aforementioned Muslim Brotherhood founder. The mission of Islam, he elaborated, is “to impose its law on all nations and to extend its power to the entire planet.” To achieve global hegemony, the Egyptian academic conceived a sophisticated plan for ground-up revolution, starting with indoctrination of the Muslim individual and family, building outward. The strategy was to pressure and infiltrate every influential institution of society, particularly academe, media, and government. A key goal, particularly in the early, strength-gaining stages, was for Islamists to ingratiate themselves with the society targeted for conquest. As internal Brotherhood memoranda seized by the FBI from the home of a top organization operative proclaimed, the American-based Islamists see their mission here primarily as “sabotage”—a “grand jihad” aimed at “the elimination and destruction of Western civilization from within.” But the specter of certain violence always hovers.

Banna called it the “art of death.” The laws of Islam could not ultimately be implemented without committing to the necessity of martyrdom and death. Not only does lethality directly clear the field of opposition; it terrorizes the infidel opponent. The extortionate effect, the fear of the next savage round, renders him more submissive to the jihad’s softer iterations—not least, the mere “political movement that favors reordering government and society in accordance with laws prescribed by Islam,” which our media and government are so anxious to bifurcate from Islamist violence.

We cannot protect ourselves by airbrushing the terrorism out of Islamist ideology. Propagation of the latter leads inexorably to instances of the former. We can continue deluding ourselves into believing this is not the case, but then we’d better prepare for more Bostons.